Paul W.S. Anderson Remaking The Three Musketeers

Paul W.S. Anderson has announced plans to reinvent The Three Musketeers, in 3-D. Anderson will co-write and produce alongside long time producing partner Jeremy Bolt. A number of bloggers are saying he’ll also direct, but that’s an assumption at this point as the source doesn’t actually say that.

The Three Musketeers was created by Alexandre Dumas in 1844, and tells of a young man, d’Artagnan, who leaves home to join the fighting force of the French king’s royal household. There he becomes friends with three of the force’s best, and most disgraced, members: Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

“We are definitely modernizing,” Anderson says. “Without compromising the fun of shooting a period piece. In our film, corsets and feathered hats don’t take center stage. Our version is rich in eye-popping action, romance and adventure.”

A modernising sensibility can go too far (see the club music of Plunkett & Macleane) but expect this to try and copy the template of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, which looks to have worked well (at least in terms of expected box office returns). This Three Musketeers is expected to hit screens in 2011.

Paul W.S. Anderson has become hated in fan circles for taking hugely popular geek titles and reinventing them unnecessarily into something worse. When we all dreamt of Aliens vs Predators, how many of us chose to set that dream in an underground pyramid on earth? None of us. When we played Resident Evil for the first time, didn’t we all want to see that mansion come to life? Instead he gave us an all-new story set in an underground office block. In fact, what is it about Paul Anderson setting stuff that wasn’t underground, underground?

Lucky in this instance none of us really care what he does with the Three Musketeers and the film adaptations have been underwhelming for years (Kiefer Sutherland’s The Three Musketeers, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Man In The Iron Mask). Indeed, there’s only one version that ever truly mattered -